Vernon Lee Clark (born December 28, 1955) is an American serial killer who sexually assaulted and murdered at least four women in the Baltimore metropolitan area between 1980 and 1989. For his known crimes, he was sentenced to multiple terms of life imprisonment, and remains a suspect in several cold cases.
Early life
Vernon Lee Clark was born on December 28, 1955, in Elkridge, Maryland. He attended Elkridge Elementary School, then Waterloo Middle School, and finally Howard High. Clark was known by friends and acquaintances as getting into trouble at school and with the law in his teen years, and usually kept to himself. His criminal tendencies followed him to adulthood, and was convicted of crimes including drug possession, burglary, and assault. In the early 1980s, he found a job as an animal skinner and worked on the side as a day laborer. He also worked for a short period of time at C & S Faulkner inc.
Murders
Clark's first victim was Rebecca H. "Dolly" Davis, a 70-year-old woman from Elkridge. Born in 1909, Davis attended Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1932. She later taught art at The Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. At the same time, she studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1937, Davis traveled to Europe to visit art museums. She returned to the United States a year later, and moved to Baltimore.
In 1941, Davis stopped painting, as she believed it did not feel appropriate during wartime. At some point in the 1970s, Clark began to do yard work for Davis. On February 16, 1980, Clark attacked Davis with a knife outside her home. He sexually assaulted her and stabbed her to death, and later hid her body in the woods behind her home. A week later, her body was found. The discovery of her body led to women in the area becoming fearful that the killer would strike again, and many installed deadbolt locks on their doors.
Clark would not become a suspect in the investigation, and remained free to claim more victims. On March 29, 1981, he is believed to have been doing handyman work for 68-year-old Evelyn Dieterich in Catonsville, when he attacked Dieterich, sexually assaulted, and killed her. Once again, Clark was not suspected in the killing, and would spend the next three years without committing any crime. On December 29, 1984, he broke into the roadside home of 81-year-old Iva Myrtle Watson in Ellicott City. Clark chased her into the woods before catching up, sexually assaulting, and beating Watson to death. This is his only known killing that occurred outside Baltimore County.
In 1989, Clark borrowed a shotgun from the Bruan Carroll Co. animal rendering plant where he worked. On July 4, 1989, Clark broke into the apartment of 23-year-old Kathleen Patricia Gouldin, sexually assaulted her, and then shot her to death with the gun.
Arrest
While investigating Gouldin's murder, police located a pizza box outside her apartment, which contained the name of a woman Clark had been chatting with hours before Gouldin's murder. The woman told investigators that Clark took the box home along with a few slices, but by the time it was located it was empty. He was immediately considered a suspect, but at the time, no other evidence linked him to the crime, so for the time being, he remained free. Detectives learned from neighbors that they had seen someone prowling around the complex around the time Gouldin was killed. A small semen sample was collected from Gouldin's body.
Police collected a search warrant to examine Clark's home and vehicle. When they rang his doorbell and informed him of this, he punched and bit the officers. For this, he was jailed on assault charges from August 9 to September 22. While incarcerated, his DNA was taken and stored in the crime lab. In January 1990, Gouldin's family members and community members offered a reward of $6,000 for information leading to an arrest. Around this time, samples of bodily fluid and semen found on Gouldin's body were compared to Clark's DNA. When the results came back, they were proven to be a complete match, and Clark was arrested on January 26, 1990, and charged with first degree murder. After his arrest, police started to suspect him in other local murder cases that dated back to the mid-1970s, although at the time, no evidence could be located to prove this.